Podunk, U.S.A. Is Real—Here's How to Find It

Where do yokels, bumpkins, and hayseeds come from? Their one-horse, backwater burg may be a quintessential American everytown, but over the centuries it's been given a name, and that name is "Podunk." The proverbial podunk town is perfectly named, so perfectly that if Podunk didn't exist, we would be forced to invent it. But how did "Podunk" come to stand in for any tiny, forgotten whistle-stop of a town? Is there still a real Podunk anywhere on the national map? The answer is yes—but maybe not for long.

Podunk was the "Lake Wobegon" of the 1840s.

In 1846, an anonymous columnist for the Daily National Pilot of Buffalo, New York wrote a series of humorous "Letters from Podunk," dispatches from a comically insignificant village. This nameless comic left behind only his or her initials—"R.P."—but the articles cemented Podunk in the American imagination as the go-to name for a rural hicksville. Within a few years, no less than Mark Twain was name-checking Podunk in his work.

The turn of the century was a golden age for komedic kartography.

Vaudeville brought with it a vogue for small-town names that were deemed hilarious thanks to an abundance of k's and other funny sounds. Oshkosh, Kankakee, Ho-Ho-Kus, Rancho Cucamonga, and Kalamazoo all came in handy, but Podunk still had an inside advantage. See, the mega-popular entertainer George M. Cohan had spent his childhood summers in Podunk, Massachusetts (part of what is today North Brookfield) and used the name in his act. By 1934, Webster's defined it as "an imaginary small town...typical of placid dullness."

Podunkers can get huffy when you question their existence.

But as Cohan's childhood attests, there was nothing imaginary about Podunk. Etymologists have traced the name back to an Algonquian word for a "marshy meadow," and colonial towns named Podunk popped up in Connecticut, New York, and Vermont. When 1930s radio broadcaster Lowell Thomas told his listeners that there was "no such place as Podunk," he was immediately corrected by a resident of Podunk, New York, outside of Ithaca, who told him that this was like saying "there is no Santa Claus!"

Living in a literal Podunk town can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As you might expect from their name, none of America's various Podunks are exactly booming. Podunk, Vermont is fewer than fifty people, their farm animals, and a boarded-up schoolhouse. Podunk, Michigan is just an abandoned dance hall, while Podunk, New York is just eight or nine houses. Maybe Webster's was right. "Podunk" might be nothing more than an imaginary place before long.

Explore the world's oddities every week with Ken Jennings, and check out his book Maphead for more geography trivia.